Nothing will slow you down and take the wind out of your sails more than clients evaluating your creative projects and picking them apart with revisions.
I've found that clients often feel like they are not only entitled to but qualified to make creative direction judgments on their project - no matter how little intelligence or background they have on the matter. Ridiculous.
In meeting with a client for the first time, I remember looking them over and thinking, "Is this the one...the client from hell that's going to go round and round on the revisions merry-go-round?" It's almost like playing Russian Roulette. But the fact of the matter is, the more you work with clients, the more likely you will eventually get this client that has no idea what they want and is just as picky to match.
Over the years I've learned about techniques and human behavior that have helped me cut down the number of revisions, you'll find most of them in my "Verbal Kung Fu for Freelancers" book, as well as my mentoring CD on iTunes called, "From Zero to Graphic Design Hero", but I did want to mentioned something extremely valuable I learned about clients after creating both of those resources.
Let's say a client hires you to create a logo, business card and web site for her. Typically what I, and most freelancers would do is start with the logo. We'd start with rough concepts, move on to more refined concepts, hone them down to 3-5 logos and then continue to grind those down until the client finally picks one. Throughout the entire process we're attempting to get the client's approval, we do this because we feel if we don't, we're wasting time.
I've got news - this approach is a HUGE time waster.
Let's continue on with the example, once you've got the logo done you then move on to the business cards and repeat virtually the same process. For most freelancers, their 2-4 weeks into the project now - no good, keep this approach to designing and you'll not only tear the hair out of your head, you'll be wasting thousands of dollars. But now you're about to learn a better way...
So What's This New Approach?
After I'd be freelancing for a while it dawned on me that the longer I was on a project the more the client tended to find "wrong" with it. Furthermore, I found that this process of creating one project at a time gave the client loads of time to mull over and obsess about what they suddenly felt should be changed.
So instead of submitting projects one slow stage at a time - and one at a time, I would submit let's say the logo (5-7 of them) and the business card all at once. This forced the client into making a whole lot of decisions at one time, rather than micromanage tiny little stages over the course of weeks. Now the clients had 5-7 good looking logos and a finished business card in front of them - ready to go, all they had to do was approve it. This tiny shift in my approach cut project turnarounds from 3-5 weeks down to 1-2 weeks. The same approach can work for you if you find yourself doing revision after revision*.
Why My Approach Works:
- It's true, the longer clients have to look at creative projects, the more they'll find wrong with them. Shorten the time they get to obsess over them.
- Clients have difficulty seeing your vision in the early stages, which cause them to nitpick. If you can show them a finish project much sooner in your process, the better off you'll be.
- By providing finish projects all at once for clients to approve, you are demonstrating your confidence in what you've created and establishing yourself as the creative director - not the client. This is a much more effective approach than asking for approval at every small stage of the process.
- I've found that while many clients are picky, some are busy to - if I have a good looking branding package ready for them to go, many will take it and avoid wasting further time with revisions that don't really matter in terms of bringing in more sales for them.
* NOTE: In order for my approach to work, you need to hone your skills in interviewing clients; being able to read/interpret what they want and sell your artwork (those skills are discussed in the resources I mentioned earlier).
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